Thursday, March 9, 2023

Inflation Reduction Act, Michigan Opioid Overdoses, WordPress, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 8, 2023

Inflation Reduction Act, Michigan Opioid Overdoses, WordPress, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Columbia Climate School: New Website Tracks Inflation Reduction Act’s Climate Provisions. “Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Environmental Defense Fund unveiled a new website today to track implementation of the climate change-related provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The website will also provide users with valuable information about the programs, protections, incentives, and tax credits offered through this historic legislation.”

CBS Detroit: State health officials launch smartphone app to help reduce opioid overdoses. “The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is launching a smartphone app to help Michigan residents reduce opioid harm. The OpiRescue app is designed to help anyone prevent opioid misuse and reduce overdose deaths by providing education, prevention and tracking of overdose reversals.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress: A New Home for WordPress.com Courses. “We’re excited to announce that our WordPress.com courses are now available at wordpress.com/learn, with no registration or purchase needed…. This learning hub also provides quick access to our live webinars (and replays) where you can join us for demonstrations, instructions, and Q&As.”

WP Tavern: Jetpack 11.9 Adds Sharing Button for Mastodon, Updates Stats Dashboard Design. “Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post.” Stopped and immediately added Mastodon sharing buttons to ResearchBuzz, ResearchBuzz Firehose, and Search Gizmos.

Search Engine Land: Google launches new Google Trends portal. “Google has launched a new look and feel for the Google Trends portal. This update brings a new look, with real-time trends on the home page, updated hourly with links directly to publishers’ news articles, the company announced.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Euronews: The EU tells Twitter to hire more human content moderators amid concerns of rise of illegal content. “The European Union and Twitter boss Elon Musk are currently butting heads over the social media giant’s content moderation policies. According to the Financial Times, EU regulators have asked Musk to hire more people to fact-check and review illegal content and disinformation.”

Euroweekly: National Library of Spain receives 42,000 records from the RNE. “SPAIN’s national library (BNE) is delighted by a donation of 42,000 vinyls from the National Radio of Spain (RNE). The haul includes 14,000 LPs and 28,000 singles, to which is added a smaller batch of CDs.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Yonhap News Agency: Google, Meta file lawsuit against S. Korean data protection watchdog’s ruling . “Google and Meta Platforms have filed a lawsuit against a ruling by the South Korean data protection watchdog to fine the global tech giants for illegally collecting personal data here, industry sources said Monday.”

Washington Post: They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam. . “Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, that their loved ones are in distress. In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people being swindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission.”

Colorado Sun: Social media apps have made buying illegal drugs about as convenient as ordering pizza, Colorado AG says. “The 182-page report outlined the ways in which drug dealers use aggressive marketing tactics to sell illegal drugs online, often targeting younger customers, and urged social media platforms and state legislators to enforce new policies to crack down on the sales.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Michigan: Online content moderators likely to experience burnout, U-M study suggests. “A study by University of Michigan School of Information researchers led by doctoral candidate Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez says volunteer content moderators, or VCMs, experience burnout stemming from interpersonal conflict between moderators, time constraints and daily exposure to toxic online behavior.”

WIRED: Billionaires Are A Security Threat. “In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the ‘evil billionaire attack’ if you’d like.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.



March 9, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Bronx Jewish History Project, Google I/O 2023, Chatbot Avatars, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 8, 2023

Bronx Jewish History Project, Google I/O 2023, Chatbot Avatars, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

I’m sorry, obviously running VERY late today. I’m taking another crack at doing short videos about my Search Gizmos. I like this effort better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXfAaWRi2kY .

NEW RESOURCES

Fordham University: Center for Jewish Studies Launches Bronx Jewish History Project . “In the first half of the 20th century, the Bronx was home to hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents, many of whom had immigrated with their families in the late 1800s and early 1900s from Europe. More than 600,000 Jewish people lived in the borough in the late 1940s, but by 2003, just about 45,000 were left, according to a 2002 Jewish Community Study by UJA-Federation.”

EVENTS

Google Blog: Let’s go. It’s Google I/O 2023. “Google I/O is back and you’re invited to join us online May 10! Learn about Google’s latest solutions, products, and technologies for developers, that help unlock your creativity and simplify your development workflow.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: D-ID’s new web app gives a face and voice to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “D-ID, the Israeli startup behind Deep Nostalgia, announced today that it’s launching the beta version of its new web app that allows users to talk face-to-face with photorealistic AI. The web app, called chat.D-ID, combines D-ID’s text-to-video streaming technology with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make conversations with AI more accessible.”

Engadget: YouTube reverses course on controversial swearing and monetization policy. “The new profanity rules YouTube introduced late last year are being relaxed — with an update outlining a less restrictive policy that will allow the use of moderate and strong profanity to be used without risking demonetization.” #FreeGrandmaPottymouth

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Harvard Gazette: HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard team up to expand access to Black history. “On Wednesday, the HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard Library announced a project to sustain and deepen capacity for the digitization, discovery, and preservation of African American history collections held in HBCU libraries and archives across the U.S.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Asahi Shimbun: GaaSyy refuses to appear in Diet to apologize, risking expulsion. “Yoshikazu Higashitani, a YouTuber-turned-lawmaker known online as ‘GaaSyy,’ has informed his secretary he will not attend the March 8 plenary session of the Diet, as ordered by the Upper House’s disciplinary committee, to apologize for failing to appear for any parliamentary proceedings.”

Rolling Stone: Twitter Bots Are Promising Cheap Guns to Anyone Using the N-Word. “When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he made it clear that eradicating spam bots was a top priority. But his strategies on that front have produced, at best, mixed results. Moreover, in recent months, some users have been plagued by a type of spam that directly violates Twitter policy: automated replies from accounts offering guns for sale.”

Bleeping Computer: FBI investigates data breach impacting U.S. House members and staff. “The FBI is investigating a data breach affecting U.S. House of Representatives members and staff after their account and sensitive personal information was stolen from DC Health Link’s servers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: The retention problem: Women are going into tech but are also being driven out. “In seeking answers to this retention problem of the tech industry, our research found that women’s negative experiences range from minor to severe harassment, sexism, discrimination and misogyny to explicit death threats. Their expertise is challenged, their contributions are not well-received and their roles are diminished.”

Ars Technica: Google’s PaLM-E is a generalist robot brain that takes commands. “On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining.” Good evening, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.



March 9, 2023 at 05:19AM
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Visit Native California, Ohio Overdose Dashboards, Call Reports Datasets, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 8, 2023

Visit Native California, Ohio Overdose Dashboards, Call Reports Datasets, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Condé Nast Traveler: Native California, a Just-Launched Online Database, Connects Travelers to the State’s Indigenous Heritage. “Launching this week, Visit Native California is an online hub from the state’s tourism bureau, intended to help local residents as well as visitors plan trips to places linked to the original occupants of the area. It’s one of the first state-led guides of this nature.”

State of Ohio: Ohio Launches New Data Dashboards to Report Overdose, Substance-Use Measures. “Ohio Governor Mike DeWine today announced that the state has launched new data dashboards to better track and report data on overdose deaths and other substance-use related measures for all 88 Ohio counties.”

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Insights from Newly Digitized Banking Data, 1867-1904. “Call reports—regulatory filings in which commercial banks report their assets, liabilities, income, and other information—are one of the most-used data sources in banking and finance. Though call reports were collected as far back as 1867, the underlying data are only easily accessible for the recent past: the mid-1980s onward in the case of the FDIC’s FFIEC call reports. To help researchers look farther back in time, we’ve begun creating a complete digital record of this ‘missing’ call report data.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Tests More To Ask & Other Alternatives Of People Also Ask?. “Google may be testing replacing the ‘people also ask’ with a ‘more to ask’ box. Google is also testing ‘People are also asking’ and ‘Others want to know’ too, instead of people also ask. I am unsure if this is just a headline change or if there is any functional difference between the ‘more to ask’ versus ‘people also ask’ but it doesn’t seem to be.”

The Verge: Twitter just let its privacy- and security-protecting Tor service expire. “Twitter has allowed the certificate for its Tor onion site to expire, effectively killing off a privacy- and speech-protecting service that it introduced last year.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: Elon Musk publicly mocks Twitter worker with disability who is unsure whether he’s been laid off. “Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. It’s the latest example of the billionaire openly antagonizing his company’s current and former staffers.”

Daily Beast: How This Rookie Congressman Got TikTok Famous. “Since that first viral post, [Congressman Jeff] Jackson has attracted nearly 500,000 followers on TikTok, and his plainspoken, no-frills videos careen through the app’s algorithm before plopping into the feeds of somewhere between 1 and 3 million people on any given day.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

SecurityWeek: Pre-Deepfake Campaign Targets Putin Critics. “According to a report from Proofpoint, TA499 targets US and European politicians, and leading businessmen and celebrities who have spoken out against Putin’s invasion. The primary purpose is to persuade the victims to take part in phone calls or video chats from which pro-Putin snippets can be elicited and published – thereby discrediting any previous anti-Putin comments.”

Wall Street Journal: FTC Twitter Investigation Sought Elon Musk’s Internal Communications, Journalist Names. “The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Notre Dame News: ‘Lyft’ vs. ‘Lift’: Consumers are less likely to support brands with unconventional spellings, study shows . “New research from the University of Notre Dame finds that in general, consumers are less likely to support uniquely spelled unfamiliar brands, compared with those that use the conventional spelling of the same word… However, the study finds there is no backfire effect when a company’s motive for selecting a uniquely spelled name is perceived as sincere.”

Cornell Chronicle: AI- or human-written language? Assumptions mislead. “Human assumptions regarding language usage can lead to flawed judgments of whether language was AI- or human-generated, Cornell Tech and Stanford researchers found in a series of experiments.”

Mercer University: Federal laws needed to protect users from confusing privacy policies, research shows. “Many companies use tactics that intentionally discourage users from reading and understanding what they’re agreeing to, ultimately resulting in users giving broad access to their personal information, according to a recent paper by a Mercer University professor and alumnus. Federal regulations are needed to address the problems of these unfair contracts, they concluded.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.



March 8, 2023 at 06:32PM
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Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Tennessee Substance Abuse Treatment, Connecticut Open Data, Bing Chat, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 7, 2023

Tennessee Substance Abuse Treatment, Connecticut Open Data, Bing Chat, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Tennessee Department of Health: New Online Resource Connects Tennesseans In Substance-Use Crisis To local Treatment Services. “FindHelpNowTN.org guides individuals to location-based openings and services available at substance use treatment facilities. Site users can search facility listings using up to 60 different features such as the type of treatment needed, insurance programs, payment methods and availability of wrap-around services.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

State of Connecticut: Governor Lamont Commemorates International Open Data Day 2023. “Governor Ned Lamont is marking International Open Data Day, which is celebrated this year on March 5, 2023, by recognizing the transparency and openness of Connecticut’s state government and highlighting recent enhancements that increase data available for the public’s use on the state’s Open Data portal, data.ct.gov.”

Ars Technica: AI-powered Bing Chat gains three distinct personalities. “On Wednesday, Microsoft employee Mike Davidson announced that the company has rolled out three distinct personality styles for its experimental AI-powered Bing Chat bot: Creative, Balanced, or Precise. Microsoft has been testing the feature since February 24 with a limited set of users. Switching between modes produces different results that shift its balance between accuracy and creativity.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

From ANSAmed, and translated from Italian (an English version is available but the formatting is really bad): Project to digitize Italian periodicals in Egypt. “A project was presented in Cairo which, through the digitization of tens of thousands of pages, aims to preserve and make available to the public the historic collection of printed periodicals by the end of the year in Egypt in the Italian language in almost 50 years, between the end of the 19th century and the pre-war period.”

Auto Evolution: I Used Google Maps and Waze for a Two-Hour Drive and the Results Are Not Surprising. “Opinions are still divided on whether Waze is better than Google Maps, or the other way around, so I decided to use both for a 2-hour drive. The purpose of the test was to determine the accuracy of the ETA but also to see which app makes the journey overall more predictable.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: 3,000 Asians in Texas had their driver’s licenses sent to a criminal group. They want answers.. “Asian Americans in Texas are angered after officials revealed this week that thousands of Asians statewide may be impacted by identity theft orchestrated through a website that involved using personal information to answer security questions.”

TechCrunch: Hackers steal gun owners’ data from firearm auction website. “Hackers breached a website that allows people to buy and sell guns, exposing the identities of its users, TechCrunch has learned. The breach exposed reams of sensitive personal data for more than 550,000 users, including customers’ full names, home addresses, email addresses, plaintext passwords and telephone numbers. Also, the stolen data allegedly makes it possible to link a particular person with the sale or purchase of a specific weapon.”

Connexion: French MPs back social media age restrictions for teenagers. “French MPs have backed a bill to reinforce a minimum ‘digital age’ of 15 for new accounts on prominent social media platforms. Those under this age will require parental confirmation to access apps such as TikTok and Snapchat.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of British Columbia: ‘Greed is good’ for likes and retweets if you’re a U.S. senator. “The researchers from UBC’s department of psychology analyzed every tweet posted by U.S. senators from early 2013 to late 2021—a total of 861,104 tweets from 140 senators. The researchers were looking specifically for communication about greed, so they could see if it correlates with more likes and retweets. As it turns out, it does.”

The Guardian: Unlocking the stories behind the shorthand. “The largest part of the collection was made up of reporter’s notebooks, chiefly written in shorthand. Sadly, a combined decade and a half as archivists in a newspaper archive had left us none the wiser when it came to reading this. When we managed to secure a precious few minutes of help from some of the Guardian’s journalists, we found out that this was Pitman New Era shorthand, not widely taught in the UK since the 1970s.” Good afternoon, Internet..

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.



March 8, 2023 at 01:57AM
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Family Airline Seating, Royal Astronomical Society, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 7, 2023

Family Airline Seating, Royal Astronomical Society, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 7, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

CBS: DOT tool shows which airlines let families sit together for free. “The Transportation Department on Monday debuted a new dashboard that shows families which airlines guarantee they can sit together without paying extra fees, as the Biden Administration takes steps to crack down on so-called ‘junk fees.'”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Royal Astronomical Society: Royal Astronomical Society announces all journals to publish as open access from 2024. “The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has today announced that all journals published by the Society will be Open Access (OA) from January 2024. This move will enable everyone in the global community to have free, immediate, and unrestricted access to the high-quality research published in the portfolio of RAS journals.”

BBC: Twitter insiders: We can’t protect users from trolling under Musk. “Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.”

USEFUL STUFF

Craig Silverman / Digital Investigations: Getting the most out of the Wayback Machine. “Roughly a year ago, the Wayback Machine Chrome extension got a major update. The new version has useful customization features and the ability to connect it to your personal Wayback Machine account, making it an even more essential tool for journalists and investigators.”

MIT Technology Review: How to log off. “In search of ways to cut down on aimless time online, I went to talk to some experts about how to forge a healthier, happier relationship with my devices and the internet. Here’s my mini-guide on how to log off.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Associated Press: Thousands of pro-Trump bots are attacking DeSantis, Haley. “Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump.”

CNN: Twitter hit with one of the biggest outages since Elon Musk took over. “Twitter’s website was inaccessible for many users on Monday while others reported issues seeing photos and clicking through links in the app, marking one of the most wide-ranging service disruptions to date under new owner Elon Musk.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Markup: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You. “When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart—and grocery chains like Kroger are reaping huge profits selling this data to brands and advertisers.”

Times of India: Government has new guidelines for social media influencers influencers and celebrity brand ambassadors. “As per the guidelines, the endorsements must be made in simple and clear language. The guidelines also say that individuals must not endorse any product or service that they have not personally used or experienced.”

CT News Junkie: Towns Try Again to Shift Legal Notices to Their Websites. “Municipal leaders in Connecticut resumed on Friday a near-annual push to repeal a long-standing requirement that they publish legal notices in local newspapers and instead allow such notifications to be made on municipal websites.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: More than just risk: LGBTQIA+ young people use social media to sustain and make sense of family relationships. “Social media offers new opportunities to be visible, and many people have shared their celebrations of Pride during this time. However, not everyone. Our new research shows that LGBTQIA+ young people are deciding what to post on social media sites with their families in mind, to foster and maintain ties with them.”

Garbage Day: I Gave Into The New Twitter Algorithm And I Went Way Too Viral. “I would put out links to Garbage Day, they would get like 5-10 retweets (if that), and I had sort of accepted that my time using the site regularly was over. But as I was lurking on the app, my very sick and compulsive content-making brain started to turn on and I began to slowly get how the site worked now. So I finally decided to put my theory to the test and it worked both times.” Laughing a little at him getting “only” 5-10 retweets. Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.



March 7, 2023 at 06:32PM
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Monday, March 6, 2023

I Hate People Lacking What They Need So I Made Cecily’s Book Tea

I Hate People Lacking What They Need So I Made Cecily’s Book Tea
By ResearchBuzz

I spent last week and the weekend doing a lot of messing around with JavaScript and ended up, today, with three Gizmos I needed to write about. I titled the first article “I Hate Searching Google For News So I Created A Gizmo To Make It Better,” and as a joke at myself I decided to give the other two articles similar titles. So we’ll end the hate title trilogy today with a look at Cecily’s Book Tea,at https://searchgizmos.com/cecilys-book-tea/ .

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 14-01-04

A lady on Mastodon named Cecily was looking for a way to get book descriptions for a list of books programmatically. That seemed like a good excuse to play with the Internet Archive’s Open Library API to see if it could do something like that. And it could.

It’s very simple. Put a list of books, one per line:

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 14-24-59

Click the search button. After a few seconds you will get a carat (^) delimited CSV file spat out to your computer. It’ll have the title in one side and the description on the other:

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 14-28-45

That’s it, that’s all it does. But if you’re trying to get book summaries together I guess it’ll save you a lot of time.  It doesn’t have descriptions for every book I searched for, but it had a lot. It seems to do better with fiction than non-fiction.

I have made things based on suggestions before but this is the first time I went from someone asking to a working Gizmo in less than two hours. Because of that I haven’t done much tinkering with it, just put it up. I’ve done a little more work with the Open Library API and I have a nice little  thing that pulls a little data and translates Dewey Decimal numbers at the hundred level, but I need a Gizmo for that. Until then I’ve tucked it away in a pile of script sketches.



March 7, 2023 at 01:16AM
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I Hate Searching Google News For Famous People So I Made Double Stuff Gossip Machine

I Hate Searching Google News For Famous People So I Made Double Stuff Gossip Machine
By ResearchBuzz

Searching Google News for popular people and topics can be annoying. You’re likely to get a lot of noise in your search results, and even when you don’t, results tend to deal with recent events. That’s great if you want to just get an idea of what’s happening right now, but it can confound attempts to do deeper background news searches on a famous person. Of course if you have information about specific topics and events you can add those to your query and eliminate some of the junk in your results, but what if you don’t?

Last year I made a Search Gizmo called Gossip Machine.  It uses a Wikipedia article’s page view activity to single out dates which might be especially newsworthy for that article’s topic and then creates a Google News search for that topic on that date. For example, you might want to refresh yourself on what Mark Zuckerberg was up to in 2018. You run that query in Gossip Machine, which will resolve to a list of newsy day candidates:

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 11-43-51

Pick a date and a new tab will open with a date-specific Google News search.

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 11-46-34

Making the searches this date-specific seems to dodge a lot of the crud that devils Google News searches, though some of it creeps in from time to time. And as you see Gossip Machine can provide some seriously focused news searches.

But what if you’re not interested in just one topic, but in how two topics intersect? Maybe you don’t want to find news about Mark Zuckerberg, but rather Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. I found myself wanting the feature of two topics more and more as I used Gossip Machine, so I tore it apart and put it together again into Double Stuff Gossip Machine ( https://searchgizmos.com/double-stuff-gossip-machine/ ).

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 12-06-33

Using Double Stuff Gossip Machine

Double Stuff Gossip Machine analyzes the page views of two Wikipedia articles and finds the unusually busy days they have in common. Like Gossip Machine, it then organizes those dates into Google News searches. If you run a search for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in 2018 you’ll get a grand total of ONE result:

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 12-15-23

But that result is packed with meaningful results:

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 12-16-46

When you’re using Double Stuff Gossip Machine, you don’t have to limit yourself to just searching people. You can search people/place or people/topic as well. For example, you could try searching for Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine in 2019. You’ll get a good number of results.

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 12-24-04

The search result pages are right on target.

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 12-25-29

You may have noticed that there’s an option to change the “Newsworthiness” of your match. That lets you change how much busier than usual the Wikipedia pageviews are before they’re picked up by Gossip Machine. It will give you more results but in my experience generally not LOTS more; Setting the Zuckerberg / Sandberg search to the “I’m a Gossip Fiend” setting (which provides the most matches) provides three dates instead of one, though results from those dates are still focused.

Screenshot from 2023-03-06 12-47-47

I love tinkering with Wikipedia  – this centralized, constantly-growing repository has a free API and page view data available? I feel like I’ve barely gotten started digging around in this gold mine. Stay tuned.



March 7, 2023 at 12:07AM
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